The manipulation of fluids to form fluid streams of desired configuration, discontinuous fluid streams, droplets, particles, dispersions, etc., for purposes of fluid delivery, product manufacture, analysis, and the like, is a relatively well-studied art. For example, highly monodisperse gas bubbles, less than 100 microns in diameter, have been produced using a technique referred to as capillary flow focusing. In this technique, gas is forced out of a capillary tube into a bath of liquid, where the tube is positioned above a small orifice, and the contraction flow of the external liquid through this orifice focuses the gas into a thin jet which subsequently breaks into equal-sized bubbles via a capillary instability. A similar arrangement can be used to produce liquid droplets in air.
Microfluidic systems have been described in a variety of contexts, typically in the context of miniaturized laboratory (e.g., clinical) analysis. Other uses have been described as well. For example, International Patent Application Publication No. WO 01/89788 describes multi-level microfluidic systems that can be used to provide patterns of materials, such as biological materials and cells, on surfaces. Other publications describe microfluidic systems including valves, switches, and other components.
Precision manipulation of streams of fluids with microfluidic devices is revolutionizing many fluid-based technologies. Networks of small channels are a flexible platform for the precision manipulation of small amounts of fluids. The utility of such microfluidic devices depends critically on enabling technologies such as the microfluidic peristaltic pump, electrokinetic pumping, dielectrophoretic pump or electrowetting driven flow. The assembly of such modules into complete systems provides a convenient and robust way to construct microfluidic devices. However, virtually all microfluidic devices are based on flows of streams of fluids; this sets a limit on the smallest volume of reagent that can effectively be used because of the contaminating effects of diffusion and surface adsorption. As the dimensions of small volumes shrink, diffusion becomes the dominant mechanism for mixing leading to dispersion of reactants; moreover, surface adsorption of reactants, while small, can be highly detrimental when the concentrations are low and volumes are small. As a result current microfluidic technologies cannot be reliably used for applications involving minute quantities of reagent; for example, bioassays on single cells or library searches involving single beads are not easily performed. An alternate approach that overcomes these limitations is the use of aqueous droplets in an immiscible carrier fluid; these provide a well defined, encapsulated microenvironment that eliminates cross contamination or changes in concentration due to diffusion or surface interactions. Droplets provide the ideal microcapsule that can isolate reactive materials, cells, or small particles for further manipulation and study. However, essentially all enabling technology for microfluidic systems developed thus far has focused on single phase fluid flow and there are few equivalent active means to manipulate droplets requiring the development of droplet handling technology. While significant advances have been made in dynamics at the macro- or microfluidic scale, improved techniques and the results of these techniques are still needed. For example, as the scale of these reactors shrinks, contamination effects due to surface adsorption and diffusion limit the smallest quantities that can be used. Confinement of reagents in droplets in an immiscible carrier fluid overcomes these limitations, but demands new fluid-handling technology.
Furthermore, the underlying physics of the influence of electric fields on fluids is well known. The attractive and repulsive forces produced by an electric field on positive or negative charges give rise to the forces on charged fluid elements, the polarization of non-polar molecules, and the torque on polar molecules which aligns them with the field. In a non-uniform field, because the force on the positively charged portion of the distribution is different than the force on the negatively charged portion, polar molecules will also experience a net force toward the region of higher field intensity. In the continuum limit, the result is a pondermotive force in the fluid. In the limit of high droplet surface tension, it is useful to describe the net pondermotive force on a droplet as if it were a rigid sphere:F=qE+2π(εm)r3(K)∇E2,where the first term is the electrophoretic force on the droplet (q is the net droplet charge and E is the electric field), and the second term is the dielectrophoretic force (r is the radius of the sphere, R(K) is the real part of the Clausius-Mossotti factorK=(ε*p−ε*m)/(ε*p+2ε*m),and ε*p and ε*m are the complex permittivities of the droplet and carrier fluid).
Although utility of electrophoretic control of droplets is great, it does have significant limitations. First, the charging of droplets is only effectively accomplished at the nozzle. Second, the discharge path required to eliminate screening effects also discharges the droplets. Third, finite conductivity of the carrier fluid, however small, will eventually discharge the droplets. Therefore, once the droplet is formed, there is essentially only one opportunity to perform any pondermotive function which relies on the droplet's charge density (such as coalescing oppositely charged droplets through their mutual Coulombic attraction, or electrophoretically sorting a droplet), and that function can only be performed as long as sufficient charge has not leaked off of the droplet.
Thus, it would be desirable to develop an electrically addressable emulsification system that combines compartmentalization and electrical manipulation, which allows for multi-step chemical processing, including analysis and sorting, to be initiated in confinement with exquisite timing and metering precision, for use in a variety of chemical, biological, and screening assays, in which the cost and time to perform such assays would be drastically reduced. It would also be desirable to develop a device using dielectrophoretic force (which does not rely on charge density) to manipulate droplets so that more than one electrical pondermotive function can be carried out following a significantly long delay from droplet formation.